“But where’s Mrs. Appleton now?”
“Nobody knows where she went. She’s either alive or dead.”
“What was her name?”
“Corinna.”
Alive or dead, made love, before you were born-these phrases, each rich with mystery, rendered the night brimming around us terribly deep, and from beyond the far rim like an encircling serpent my father’s death seemed to tighten its coil. The darkness that above the heads of the houses swept past the stars and enclosed them like flecks of mica in an ocean seemed great enough to contain even this most mighty of impossible events. I chased him, his profile pale and grim in streetlight, and like a ghost he kept always a step ahead of me. He put on his cap and my head was cold.
“What are we going to do?” I called after him.
“We’ll drive into Alton,” he said. “I’ll get my X-ray at
the Homeopathic and then I’ll go across the street to the
Y.M.C.A. I want you to go to the movies. Get in where it’s warm and come up to the Y afterwards. That should be about seven-thirty or quarter to eight. The meet should be over by eight. It’s about quarter after five now. Do you have enough money for a hamburg?”
“Sure, I guess. Hey. Daddy. How are your aches and pains?”
“Better, Peter. Don’t worry about me. One nice thing about having a simple mind, you can only think about one pain at a time.”
“There ought to be some way,” I said, “to make you healthy.”
“Kill me,” my father said. The sentence sounded strange, outdoors, in the dark and cold, coming from above, as his face and body hurried forward. “That’s the cure-all,” he said. “Kill me.”
We walked west to where the car had been left on the school parking lot and got into it and drove into Alton. Lights, there were lights on both sides solidly supporting us for the full three miles, except for the void on the right that was the poorhouse corn fields and for the interval in which we crossed the Running Horse River over the bridge where the hitchhiker had seemed to lift into the air on his long-heeled shoes. We cut through the gaudy heart of the city, across Riverside Drive, up Pechawnee Avenue, into Weiser Street and Conrad Weiser Square, up Sixth, across the railroad station parking lot, and down an alley only my father seemed to know about. The alley led us to where the railroad embankment widened into a black shoulder sparkling with cinders, near the Essick’s coughdrop plant, which flooded the whole sinister area with its sickly-sweet fumes. The Essick’s employees used this leftover sloping bit of railroad property as a parking lot, and so my father used it now. We got out. The slams of our doors echoed. The shape of our car sat on its shadow like a frog looking into a mirror. It was alone on the lot. A blue light overhead kept watch like a cold angel.
My father and I parted by the railroad station. He walked left, toward the hospital. I walked on, to Weiser Street, where five movie theatres advertised their shows. The downtown crowds were streaming home. The matinees were dismissed; the stores, their windows proclaiming January White Sales and drifted deep with cotton sheets, were stringing pad locked chains across their doors; the restaurants were in the lull of setting up the tables for dinner; the old men with the soft-pretzel carts draped them with tarpaulins and pushed them away. The city excited me most at this hour, when my father abandoned me and I, a single cross-current in the tidal exodus, strolled homeless, free to gaze into jewellers’ windows, to eavesdrop at the mouths of cigar stores, to inhale the breath of pastry shops where fat ladies in rimless spectacles and white smocks sighed behind bright trays of bear-claws, sticky buns, glazed doughnuts, pecan rolls, and shoo-fly pies. At this hour when the workers and shoppers of the city were hurrying by foot, bus, car, and trolley home to their duties, I was for a time released from mine, not merely permitted but positively instructed by my father to go to a movie and spend two hours out of this world. The world, my world with all its oppressive detail of pain and inconsequence was behind me; I wandered among caskets of jewels which would someday be mine. Frequently at this moment, my luxurious space of freedom all before me, I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her distance to control me or protect me, my mother with her farm, her father, her dissatisfaction, her exhausting alternations of recklessness and prudence, wit and obtuseness, transparence and opacity, my mother with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of earth and cereal, my mother whose blood I was polluting in the gritty inebriation of Alton’s downtown. Then I would seem smothered in a rotten brilliance and become very frightened. But my guilt could not be eased, I could not go to her, for of her own will she had placed ten miles between us; and this rejection on her part made me veng ful, proud, and indifferent: an inner Arab.
The five movie palaces of Weiser Street in Alton were Loew’s, the Embassy, the Warner, the Astor, and the Ritz. I went to the Warner and saw “Young Man with a Horn,” starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Lauren Bacall. As my father had promised, it was warm inside. My best piece of luck for the day, I came in on the cartoon. The day was the thirteenth of the month so I did not expect it to be lucky. The cartoon was, of course, a Bugs Bunny. Loew’s had Tom and Jerry, the Embassy Popeye, the Astor either Disney, the best, or Paul Terry, the worst. I bought a box of popcorn and a box of Jordan Almonds, though both were bad for my skin. The sidelights were soft yellow and time melted. At the end, when the hero, the trumpeter who was based upon Bix Beiderbecke, had finally fought free of the rich woman who with her insinuating crooked smile (Lauren Bacall) had been corrupting his art, and the good artistic woman (Doris Day), her lover restored to her, sang, and behind her own trans parent voice Harry James’s trumpet pretending to be Kirk Douglas’s lifted like a silver fountain higher and higher into “With a Song in My Heart”-only here, on the last note, an absolutely level ecstasy attained, did I remember my father. An urgent sense of being late caught me up.
The sidelights turned bright. I fled from my seat. In the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that lined the sloping glaring lobby I saw myself full-length, flushed, pink-eyed, the shoulders of my flaming shirt drenched with the white flakes I had scratched from my scalp in the dark. It was a habit of mine to scratch when unseen. I brushed my shoulders wildly and on the cold street was startled by the real faces, which seemed meager and phantasmal after the great glowing planetary visions I had been watching slowly collide, merge, part, and recombine. I ran toward the Y.M.C.A. It was two blocks up from Weiser Street, at Perkiomen and Beech. I ran along the railroad tracks. The narrow pavement was lined with small bars and shut barber parlors. The sky was an un steady yellow above the tenements and even at the zenith paleness drained stars from the night. The smell of cough-drops coming from a distance mocked my panic. The perfect city, the city of the future, seemed remote and irrelevant and conceived in cruelty.
The Y.M.C.A. smelled of sneakers and the floor was scuffed gray. At the center desk a Negro boy sat reading a comic book underneath a bulletin board shingled with obsolete posters and bygone tournament results. Far away down a strangely green hall, green as if lit by bulbs shining through grape arbor leaves, a game of billiards studiously muttered. From the other direction drifted the patient ga-glokka, gaglokka of a ping-pong game. The boy behind the desk looked up from his comic book and frightened me; there were no Negroes in Olinger and I was superstitiously timid of them. They seemed to me wizards, possessing the black secrets of love and song. But his face was all innocence, all innocence and the shade of malted milk. “Hi,” I said and, holding my breath, swiftly walked to the passageway that led to the downward flight of concrete that in turn led, through the locker room, to the pool. As I descended, the odors of water and chlorine and a third, as of skin, grew upon me.